Conversely, ‘Strangers’ has a choppy groove with mangled vocal and guitar cuts surfacing in fragments.

Complete with a hook from Dylan Cartlidge, he matches the leaf-green atmosphere so well, it feels like it was pulled directly from the 55-year-old Doris & Kelley song the track samples. Joey Bada$$ and Russ surprisingly match Thought’s pace on the former. ‘Cheat Codes’ invites almost as many guests as it has tracks, and the pique of the guest tracks are the two wildly different posse cuts, ‘Because’ and ‘Strangers’. That his flow is so unbroken while doing this is testament to his natural wordsmithery. “From a silhouette standing in the aperture / to a figurehead standing in the path of a killer”, he dramatises on ‘The Darkest Part’. The mobster character Thought immerses himself in allows him to create lucid scenes with single bars. On ‘No Gold Teeth’, he finds a myriad of ways to convince you of his hunger and determination, none of which feel like a lie.Īs consistently sharp as ever, Thought exudes a braggadocio he’s rarely exhibited until this stage in his career. The producer creates the sonic uphill battle that Black Thought conquers. Danger Mouse’s beats mirror this sense of seediness throughout the record, from the cool jazz of ‘Identical Deaths’ to the Griselda-quoting ‘Saltwater’. Those are literal scars, by the way: “everybody wrist got razor marks / in the projects, townships, favelas and trailer parks”, he raps over the title track’s rickety percussion. Lyrically, ‘Cheat Codes’ is a gangsta rap album that describes a seedy world Black Thought hustles in and receives battle scars from. What else remains from the ‘Danger Doom’ era is the certainty about how Mouse was able to hold his own at a time when Madlib and J Dilla were kingpins. Moving away from the cartoonishness of that project, Mouse instead uses flaky samples to create a cohesive, bluesy and, at times, abstract blueprint. For the New York artist, the album sees him dusting off the cobwebs, as it’s the first time he’s producing for a rapper full-time since the cult-classic 2005 Danger Doom collaboration with MF DOOM. To pull Danger Mouse back into the field he first caught attention in, is akin to underground rap’s answer to No Way Home.

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